CEO Obamacare? In Case The Corporate Fascism Is Not Obvious Enough

The sheer speed at which the United States is running toward open, undisguised fascism is making me nauseous. The road to serfdom is becoming a racetrack. From Reuters, “Exclusive: U.S. government urged to name CEO to run Obamacare market.”

The White House is coming under pressure from some of its closest allies on healthcare reform to name a chief executive to run its federal health insurance marketplace and allay the concerns of insurers after the rocky rollout of Obamacare.

Advocates have been quietly pushing the idea of a CEO who would set marketplace rules, coordinate with insurers and state regulators on the health plans offered for sale, supervise enrollment campaigns and oversee technology, according to several sources familiar with discussions between advocates and the Obama administration.

Supporters of the idea say it could help regain the trust of insurers and others whose confidence in the healthcare overhaul has been shaken by the technological woes that crippled the federal HealthCare.gov insurance shopping website and the flurry of sometimes-confusing administration rule changes that followed.

The advocates include former White House adviser Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of President Barack Obama’s former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, and the Center for American Progress, the Washington think tank founded by John Podesta, the president’s newly appointed senior counselor.

First of all, the only reason the White House would need to “regain” the trust of health insurance companies is because they had won their trust in the first place. In other words, the insurance companies were hoping they could make a lot of money when everyone was legally required to buy their product. Now they feel betrayed but I have no sympathy for them.

Secondly that “flurry of sometimes-confusing administration rule changes” confirms what I have said before, that the Affordable Care Act is not even really a law.

People act like the government is so competent and careful. But this whole “system” is being made up as they go. Remember, the Affordable Care Act is not even a real law: it is more like a commission to the bowels of the Health and Human Services bureaucracy to defecate pounds of pages of new regulations every year. So while the Obamacare law is the size of a telephone book, the regulations that have already been written are at least the size of a stack of telephone books piled eight feet high.

Notice that no one is proposing definitive, objective, laws that will result in justice. That is not possible. All people can do is propose the invention of a new dictator who will somehow be more successful or at least more trustworthy than Kathleen Sebelius.

This is a procedure that F. A. Hayek documented and described in his classic book, The Road to Serfdom. You can see an illustrated condensation of his thesis here. Hayek noticed that, even though people claim to have a plan that will work, they never really do. Instead they have unbounded faith in finding the right planner, who is not a planner at all, but an authoritative person who makes up ad hoc changes as they seem necessary.

That is obviously what is happening now. They advocates of Reform have no real changes to propose, other than trying to find a job title that is more trusted by more people.